Nomad is located at Nguyen Ai Quoc Street, Bien Hoa city, Dong Nai province, Vietnam, where most of the population is devout to Catholicism with a church every few kilometers. With a unique local culture, we wanted to create something that associates people with this land. So, the atmosphere of a small chapel provided us the inspiration – for what we aim for. It’s gentle and quiet.
Function. Ground floor: An opening space without walls, inside and outside connected with rotating steel-glass door systems along the façade that open to welcome everyone, it likes a public space. Upper floor: With a quiet atmosphere, it is close to being at home. The project consists of 2 areas: indoor (connected with the ground floor through the void space, people can see the surrounding view); outdoor is the balcony (running along the facade, creating a themed buffer space between the inside and the outside).
Construction plan and Materials. Construction plan: Kept the available old reinforcement concrete structures and let them show out. To increase the need for uses in the project, we added the steel structure, with modules: corrugated perforated steel plate module rotated glass doors systems module. An elliptic iron scale is calculated to optimize the area. We hope that when the contract of house renting ends here, materials will be processed and reused for the new project. Materials: We used as less materials as we can, there is a marked contrast between steel, glass, and handmade floor-wall material.
Nomad means moving from one place to another rather than staying in one place all of the time. The investor chose that name and rent the land for 5 years only. Based on it, we thought about building a coffee house with the atmosphere in the small chapels and using steel, and glass materials that can be moved and reused after the rent contract ended.
With limited space, we carefully arrange furniture items to optimize the usable area. Taking advantage of the available surrounding landscape, we arranged space layouts for indoors and outdoors to create as many experiences as possible.
Architects: A+H architect
Lead Architect: Nguyen The Anh
Photographs: Tran Nhat Quang